When it comes to board games, often our fathers have taught us everything we know - namely, how to cheat! Playing Monopoly with your son is apparently an open invitation to nominate yourself as banker, as the responsible adult, and then proceed to squirrel away hundreds of pounds in a cache underneath Oxford Street, ready for a rainy day. Getting away with it is easy, as your naïve offspring never suspects that such foul play would be thinkable.

The big cheat in Scrabble is the classic peek at your opponent's hand. Or you could try something more inventive, such as claiming that a legitimate move (when you're losing) is to viciously claw the board like a rabid badger, sending tiles hurtling all over the shop, whilst shouting "Scrabble"! Hence you're "scrabbling" the tiles, the very move the game was named after, a gambit which ends the match in a forced draw (and possibly a blocked vacuum cleaner).

Of course, this isn't possible in a virtual game of Scrabble against the computer, more's the pity. The AI plays a pretty tough game, and with 10 skill levels to pick from, on maximum it's punishing in the extreme. An average Scrabble player will find level 6 to be a reasonably challenging game, and the AI has certainly been sharpened at the top levels since the last version of Scrabble on the PC.

As well as traditional Scrabble, it's possible to play duplicate Scrabble which removes any luck element by dealing both players the same tiles and challenging them to make the highest scoring word possible. Scrabble 2003 also offers four mini word games, a championship gaming mode complete with timed turns, the official Scrabble Word dictionary and Internet play options.

The mini games vary a little in quality. "Making the point" presents you with a partially played game which you have to finish, reaching a predefined target score. "Conundrum" challenges you to make the highest scoring word from a single set of tiles, whilst "Anagram" asks you to solve, well, anagrams.

"Word challenge" is a little dull, requiring you to make as many words as possible from a single set of tiles. To be honest, none of these mini games will keep you enthralled for too long, except Making the point which is more substantial. It's the main game that will hold your interest.

Not only is Scrabble 2003 well featured, it's well presented too. The nifty 3D board graphics and smartly crafted interface are impressive. On the sonic front, a selection of classical music wafts elegantly from your speakers, although this does get a touch repetitive after a while.

The Internet options, however, are a little disappointing as they seem rather unfinished. You can only indulge in two-player games over the Internet (four on a LAN) and you can't partake of the mini games online either. This is a real shame, as some of them might be a tad more interesting when played against human competition.

There are minor niggles with Scrabble 2003: the Internet play options aren't very well fleshed out and some of the mini games lose their sparkle pretty quickly. Overall however, it's a well presented version of the word game which boasts tournament rules and the official Scrabble word list, along with computer AI which takes some beating. It's a quality product and nicely priced too.